Faculty

Linda Shapiro, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical and Informatics and Medical Education, earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1970 and master’s and Ph.D degrees in computer science from the University of Iowa in 1972 and 1974, respectively. She was a faculty member in Computer Science at Kansas State University from 1974 to 1978 and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1979 to 1984. She then spent two years as Director of Intelligent Systems at Machine Vision International in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She joined the University of Washington Electrical Engineering (now ECE) Department Department in 1986 and the Computer Science & Engineering Department in 1990.

Professor Shapiro’s research is in computer vision with related interests in image and multimedia database systems, artificial intelligence (search, reasoning, knowledge representation, learning), and applications in medicine and robotics. She has worked heavily in knowledge-based 3D object recognition and has contributed to both the theory of object matching and to the development of experimental machine vision systems. Her current work includes robot vision, cancer biopsy analysis, brain image analysis, and semantic segmentation.

Professor Shapiro was the editor-in-chief of Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing for 10 years. She was the 1993-95 chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, conference chair of the 1986 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, co-program chairman of the 1994 conference, and co-chair of the 2008 conference. She was also the co-chair of the Biomedical and Multimedia Applications Track of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in 2002. She has co-authored a textbook on data structures, a two-volume graduate text on computer and robot vision, and an undergraduate computer vision text. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IAPR.

When not working on academic ventures, Professor Shapiro likes to relax with family and noncompetitive activities such as gardening, dog walking, watching her son Michael’s sports events, hiking, fishing, and camping.